T A L

Translated from “La Banquise” #1 by Miael William. Translator’s note: the following text ﬁrst appeared in the theoretical anti-state communist journal “La Banquise”, whi was published in the early to mid-1980s. Copies of “La Banquise” and “Le Brise-Glace” (mid to late 1980s) are still available by writing to Mordicus, a more recent journal in whi some former “La Banquise” and “Le Brise-Glace” members are participating. Write to: Mordicus, B.P. 11, 75622 Paris Cedex 13, France. Later published in “Anary: A Journal of Desire Armed” #38 — Fall ’93.

early-mid 1980s T A L

. People’s freedom. . . the sacred and crime are ways to escape the present and to give it meaning. . . . and will be transmied. . . . . . Love. . . . . . . . All life (collective or individual) implies boundaries. . . . it evokes profanation in order to exclude it and in so doing reinforces itself. . . turn these places beyond oneself into entities whi crush people’s being. . . . . . . will project them outside themselves. morality — any morality — and. . Until now. . It will create and multiply distant places and the pleasure of losing oneself in them. 5 5 12 16
cut oﬀ and circumscribed by religion. . . but also the capacity to create what is new. . . . . . us there will be no more room for religion — those of yesteryear or modern religions whi no longer recognize gods. . . . it will make it possible to avoid being dominated by it. . . . Crime . . . . . . . . . ese three means of going beyond daily life are neither generalized nor abolished by communism. . . ough punished. e sacred inherently contains the threat of being profaned. . Crime: the only way out when the norm can no longer be respected or circumvented. . crime fascinates. . . . even more insidiously. what subverts a “natural” submission to any type of worldly order. those whi do not present themselves as ones.
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. . ways of behaving will circulate. . . . . Communism will not level the “magic mountain”. . As an absolute separation between an interior and an exterior the sacred will melt away. . . . . . . transformed and produced along with social relationships. . Positive or negative: ea of them include araction and rejection and enter into a relationship of araction and rejection with respect to ea other. Ecstasy . . . . . . . . But communism will be amoral in the sense that there will be no ﬁxed norms whi are external to social life. .Contents
LOVE — ECSTASY — CRIME . . . Love is put on a pedestal but people mistrust it. . . . their capacity to modify nature. . . . Not without clashes or violence. . . . just devils whi are to be ejected from the social body. Love . . . . .

ese customs do not exclude material production (the bourgeois morality of the family. One of the proofs of the potency of a communist movement will be its capacity to recognize. It was then banalized by capitalism in the 20th and is something we can go beyond in a totally communist life. ecstasy. ere are no good social customs as far as a radical critique is concerned. with respect to the Cioran quote whi opened this section. an escape whi is immediately
is introduction to a critique of social customs is a contribution to a necessary revolutionary anthropology. include the entirety of human relations from a viewpoint of the sentiments. is indissociable from the work ethic). It is then that humanity will really have to demonstrate whether it loves freedom or not. For now. It is a movement whi is based on the central role of workers without being a form of workerism.even a gleam of a possibility of transforming it? However. have been given a privileged role. reformism thrives on separation by piling up demands in parallel spheres without ever questioning these spheres themselves. there will be less and less room for half oices. and into the sacred. “sexuality” came into being as a specialized sphere of human activity during 19th century capitalism. For. e communist movement possesses a dimension whi is both a class and human one. this text is not a “critique of daily life. there can be no revolutionary critique without a critique of the customs and lifeways whi preceded capitalism. taking refuge in a few people who. making the critique of morality more delicate than other critiques. *** Love. More and more the oice will be between what exists and no cops at all. the response must be that the sweat and disasters whi do not belong to us and that the world imposes are the ones that are really intolerable. “Customs. and without being a humanism it moves toward a human community.” whi is an historical and cultural product in the same sense as the economy and work. and there is behaviour whi turns theory into a moery. e meaning of what we do is the possibility that the social connection is guaranteed only by itself. To be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary period… What counts is less the unavoidably fragmented and mutilating results of this contradiction than the contradiction itself and the tension of refusal.” on the contrary.” Su a critique expresses only the social space whi is excluded from work and is in competition with it. Along with work and the economy. and no careerism — there is no way that precise and deﬁnitive forms of refusal can be pinned down. and the way they have been integrated by it. Calling for “a few less cops” will become less feasible. by ance or out of necessity. the only excuse at our disposal is that history will avenge us. this gap and contradiction between the dimensions of class and community. and in practice to supersede. What follows is not a text about “sexuality. for example. It is this gap and contradiction whi ﬂourish in the ambiguities of emotional life. Since in its own way capitalism sums up the human past whi produced it. when it was ﬁnalized and theorized (discovered). for beer or worse. For the same reasons. When time is killing us. beyond a few simple principles — no participating in attempts at mystiﬁcation or repression (neither cops nor stars). Love is the impossible love of humanity whi is fulﬁlled in a few individuals. there are just ones whi are worse than others.
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. Love: the consequence of indiﬀerence and generalized selﬁshness. And that it works! If the social crisis worsens. Why criticize the misery of social customs if this misery will persist? Only in relation to communism does our behaviour make sense. Ecstasy: a voyage beyond the profane. crime: three historical products through whi humanity has lived and lives its practical and emotional relations. the banal.

is a society without monsters.element of envy in the crowd’s cries of hatred is obvious. It is this “almost” that bothers us: to continue to view the world lucidly you have to possess a tension whi is hard to keep up because it implies a refusal. including death. e words being-in-its-totality. whereas capitalist society is gripped by a frantic need to guarantee against every mishap of life. marginalization and sterility contribute to maintaining passion just as mu as they tend to congeal it into misanthropic mean-spiritedness or intellectual frenzy. Without monsters because everyone will ﬁnally recognize. Every conceivable danger and risk. When one is aer a critique of the totality of this world. — must be “insured against. communists know from practice that they only exist as they are because everyone exists the way they do. ere are times when subversive activity is almost entirely reduced to writing texts and an exange of viewpoints between individuals. Even the manifestations of biological givens do not escape their torment! To accept to procreate appears suspect: how can someone have kids in su a world when there is not
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. Even to those who are naturally blind.” e only thing whi capitalism is unable to insure against is its own disappearance. Repression and sublimation prevent people from sliding into a refusal of otherness. But communism is a society with no guarantee other than the free play of passions and needs. and we will return to it. on the contrary. ose who refuse a world organized by capital know that none of the acts of social life are unquestionable. or collective being. expresses our movement even beer than the word communism. etc. there is no question of remaining at a level of pure theory. like journalists. except “natural disasters” — war and revolution. For now it will be suﬃcient to grasp the critique of bourgeois humanism contained in this sentence. in the desires and acts of others. the diﬀerent possible shapes of their own desires and being. and a profound sterility. Whi hardly signiﬁes that no desire should be repressed. Communism. Marx’s sentence is worth developing extensively. is refusal. Whereas the Montaigne-type honest individual can become everyone thanks to the mediation of culture. whi is primarily associated with collectivizing things. a certain marginalization. “Human beings are the true being-in-its-totality of man” (Marx).

When it is comes to traing down these monsters and determining their punishment. So an example is made by homing in on one case. But without entertaining any illusions about what it is: neither the freedom of expansive desires whi do not run
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. Humanity’s nature is at the same time a purely biological given (we are primates) and the activity. that they are completely external to nature. within and outside of themselves. passions surge again at last and imaginations that appeared dead race. But what is certain is that. e
⁵Translator’s note: In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni. p. England. and being transformed in turn by it. Stripped of all metaphysical presuppositions. it is also because it simply represents the ﬂipside of the coin and thus tends to assist class society’s production of fascinating monsters.
LOVE — ECSTASY — CRIME
Love
According to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. p.⁵ But if this myth must be criticized. Nor has it been possible to prevent murder when there have been reasons to kill. is freedom. this type of imagination and its ﬁne-tuning is precisely what is aributed to that other guaranteed-non-human monster: the Nazi executioner. for the antifascist. Also see the review in this issue by John Zerzan.” is formula is comprehensible and can be of use as long as we keep in mind that humanity’s history is the history of its emancipation from nature through the creation of the economic sphere. And what is more: this exorcises the part of you whi would like to execute the defenceless bodies or the ild killer/raper too. II. 274) “For it is the tumult of humanity. “e most natural relationship between man and man is the relationship between man and woman. ere is room for discussion about the meanisms whi have brought this about (the extent to whi it resulted from diﬃculties of survival. Nor to prevent the when there have been inequalities and as long as commerce is based on the. this capacity to play to a certain extent with the rules of maer is in eﬀect human freedom. a thing whi looks like a person but to whi any real humanity is denied. London WC1N 3XX. etc. a fascination whi reaed its high point with Debord’s last appalling ﬁlm.” (Oeuvres.“I have never been able to consider existence with the distracted scorn of a man who is alone. For today’s crowds it is terrorists. people ﬁnd themselves in a situation whi radically distinguishes them from other known states of maer. e concept that humans are anti-nature. as in the case of the Situationists’ fascination with outlaws in general and Lacenaire in particular. For the Nazi it is the Jew. is the freedom that must be reconquered. with all the vulgarity of people’s big and lile needs and their ﬂagrant disgust with the police who hold them ba — it is the activity of everyone (except the cops and the friends of the cops) whi alone conditions revolutionary mental forms as opposed to bourgeois ones. of people modifying what is a purely natural given.” (Oeuvres. criminals or ild killers. Unfortunately. II. People are not external to natural conditions because they themselves are one of them. At times a shudder of passion passes through the ocean of zombies we are swimming in. by transforming their environment. It has never been possible to force everyone to respect laws whi are in contradiction with the way social relationships really work. 108–9) At times this refractory people myth has encumbered revolutionary theory. A translation of the script recently became available from BM Signpost. It is when citizens are served up a being whi is completely foreign. especially in the temperate regions. is clearly an aberration. the Nazi. But they wish to understand these conditions and have begun to play with them. from whi people have been dispossessed in the process of creating it (since it is what has nourished the economy).).

to the extent that the text provides insight into social reality. e disgusting part is the conditions whi must be fulﬁlled in order to make it possible to meet the person. or have really tasted misery like Genet. it resides in the fact that. Reading a good adventure novel can be a lot more lively than organized excursions. two people. whether there are ten people. that there is a preferable way of doing things whi we must strive towards. It also means giving full rein to our freedom to play with the laws of nature. In order to exist revolt implies that people must envisage an opportunity to react. this myth was lived passionately.” Ecrits) An entire body of nihilist literature has set out the viewpoint of the “dishbreaker. is suicide a last resort? — Precisely. What is repugnant is that.into obstacles. like Rigaut. ese “refractory people” foster an elitism whi is a false approa from the very start. a freedom whi is as mu one of re-routing the course of a body of water as it is one of making sexual use of an oriﬁce whi was not naturally “intended” for this use. the critique of human customs cannot single out one practice as opposed to another as a symbol of their misery. When someone is alone in a room writing a theoretical text. two. nor the freedom to submit to the commands of Mother Nature (who could decipher them?). exhaustion and boredom. For the rare individuals who. and one whi is hardly less antipathetic than a job skill or a morality. I am incapable of believing that there is something satisfactory. revolt is also optimistic. When it is a goal. It is sometimes said that in today’s world. it is not in one activity as opposed to another that the essence of sexual misery is to be found. it is neither his beard. But the fact that sincere intransigent mystics have no doubt existed hardly proves the existence of god. ange and disorder are considered satisfactory. Must the self-evident be belabored? ere are solitary jerk-oﬀs whi are inﬁnitely less miserable than many embraces. they fall into the worst trap. When we read a want ad in whi a man with a beard invites the old woman and her dog who live upstairs over to have some fun. signiﬁes social constraint (the con-
a morality in the sense that they will claim no illusory universality in time and space.” of people who resist any social connection (with a death urge as a compulsory corollary). however. Although the predominance of one of them may be symtomatic. Because it must give human freedom full rein. “Revolt is a form of optimism whi is hardly less repugnant than the usual kind. (…) estion — In your opinion. What is miserable is to live in a world where the only adventures are in books. in the ﬁrst place. testimony in the “Barres Aﬀair. the freedom to be found in people’s lifestyles is simply a masturbatory activity (alone. People. has not prevented most of them from losing themselves in the hum of daily life until they reaed a respectable old age. ey would like to think that they are observing a world from whi they have distanced themselves. can only understand what they are participating in. by puing an ad in Liberation [a leist daily]. boredom with roles. the boredom of sexuality as a separate activity. e worst part is not that they believe that they are superior. have osen the last resort of suicide. When they believe that they are lucid because they are on the outside. It is a question of ﬁnally realizing that only risk guarantees freedom. but that they are diﬀerent from the rest of humanity. his desire becomes a means to market a particularly nauseating ideological commodity. individuals are irremediably separated from ea other through relations of competition. e rules of the game will include the possibility of playing with the rules. Exhaustion from working. is incoherence supports the contention that these purely refractory people are just a literary myth. or if you are alone. he or she is less isolated from people than at work or in the subway. To limit oneself to this given is to misapprehend the essence of sexual misery. In Bataille’s words:
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. Sexual misery. It is not the daydreams eventually followed by results whi someone makes us experience that are disgusting. her age nor the zoophilia whi disgust us. But the aractive music of the nihilist thinkers. or more). In other words.” (Jacques Rigaut.

Sexual misery comes from an interaction between two moral orders. refuses. the traditional order has far from disappeared. In contradictory class societies what is forbidden is set in stone and simultaneously subject to be outmanoeuvred or violated. And not that Judeo-Christianity kept a lid ’ on sexuality. for its part. But isn’t a world where you must hide to oose the hour when you die a world that is extremely devalued? Communism does not use values people adopt as a starting point.mal survival in exange for maximum submission to the economy. e West has made sexuality the hidden truth of the normal conscience. On the other. it is not given a privileged position. the rules whi human beings will adopt. nature. a basis whi cannot be questioned because it does not exist. to a greater or lesser extent. Just as a crisis of morality was geing underway. To the extent that capitalist Judeo-Christian civilization has been imposed upon people. Values and taboos are constantly produced in every activity of social life. Just try being openly “pedophile. in the minds and glands of our contemporaries. It is when work and private life became more and more radically opposed that the question of social customs imposed itself. If a relative liberalization has occurred during our era. At the same time morality had to be kept in good working order and people were told not to drink too mu and that work equals dignity. that is. the traditional and modern ones whi cohabit. whi keep us from aaining the historical ideal of a sexual blossoming and of a blossoming of love. Like the law. Before having values. have presupposed a separation. Freud discovered that sexuality was the big secret of the world and of civilization as a whole. the more we free ourselves from these constraints (in our imaginations in any case). through an open aﬃrmation of sexuality (and not just the art of making love). they always wish and claim to be the basis of social life while at the same time wishing to be without a basis themselves since they are based only on God. ese social constraints exert inﬂuence in a domain whi is presented by the dominant culture and its dissident version as one of the last regions in the world where adventure remains possible. the primacy of the species — whi is not to say its survival. ere will be no falsely universal rules. e worst aspect is not that sex is repressed by Judeo-Christianity. except. tends towards a pan-sexualism where sexuality must of course be mastered but in the same sense as everything else. what is forbidden does not constitute a morality as su. the dominant outlook during the Roman Empire. Everything is sexualized. but that it organized it. but that Judeo-Christianity was dazzled by it. later. From Stoicism. and its cortege of psyological and physiological miseries.” e traditional order functions and will long continue to function for a lot of people living in the industrialized countries. where there will be no need for intangible laws that everyone knows will not be respected. Ea group carries out. e West does not control sexuality by ignoring it but by thinking of nothing else. every morality rationalizes ideology aer the fact. In many
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. and in order to have them. and. whi they impose or forbid. there are things whi people do or don’t do. In a communist world. and to a certain extent in traditional societies. the constraints of social codes). Religious law. in ways we cannot predict. becoming acute in 19th century Europe with the rise of what the bourgeoisie called the dangerous classes. It was necessary for workers to be said to be free to go to work (in order to justify the capitalists’ freedom to refuse to provide it to them). it uses the real relations they are experiencing. allows and imposes certain acts and not others. the law of the state. ere will be no absolutes. a domain whi society theoretically leaves up to individuals against whom it at the same time enacts legislation from the outside. On the one hand we suﬀer from constraints of morality and work. the more this ideal appears unsatisfactory and empty. But of madness (hysteria) as well. logic. ey will not constitute
straints of wage-labor. is is the diﬀerence compared to communism. ere is morality only because there are social customs. Christianity adopted the double concept that: 1) sex is the basis of pleasure. 2) therefore it can and should be controlled. perhaps. sexual misery also signiﬁes their profound disarray with respect to how the West has handled sexuality. e Orient. or the good of society … at is. In primitive societies. will ﬂow from communist social bonds. A tendency and its transformation into a spectacle should not be taken as a totality.

Only on this condition can looting become a point of departure for a social reappropriation and use of ries in a perspective whi is broader than one of simply consuming. And if the poor wish to oﬀer themselves a few pleasures ﬁrst. what would be the point of hoarding? e more a revolution radicalizes. But when lierateurs or artists (the surrealists for example) wish to impose I’amourfou (“mad love”) as what is most desirable. Just as easily revolt can be the oppressed person’s cry. Any more or less revolutionary period will witness the appearance of groups whi are halfway between social subversion and delinquency. It is capitalism whi imposes the monstrous scam of an assurance of maxi-
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. Not out of moralism or non-violence.” whi will be one of the key slogans of the antirevolutionaries — but by developing what is original in a communist movement: for the most part it does not repress. is means.” “counterrevolutionary. Among the ries of a world free of capital will be the inﬁnite variations of a perverse and polymorphous sexuality and sensuality. it must be stated that this is a recycled version of the great modern Western reductionist myth. Sexual morality and the morality of work and of the family went hand in hand. Only with the blossoming of these practices will the love praised by Andre Breton and Harlequin novels¹ appear for what it really is — a transitory cultural construction. Spontaneous looting will cease to be a massive ange of owners. not to punish.parts of the world it is still dominant and on the oﬀensive (in the Islamic countries and in the Eastern Bloc).” “survival tactics.
powerful movement whi was transforming social customs. in the sense of biological survival. but because any superﬂuous violence becomes autonomous and an end in itself. (Whi is not to be condemned in itself. It is because bourgeois morality has been unable to adapt to modern conditions of producing and circulating commodities. We are not. it should be clear. Its representatives. Social life is not only productive activity but also consumption and consummation. only when a world without price tags begins to spread will the possibility of harm being done by hoarders be completely removed. against “perversions. e suﬀering caused by their misdeeds is still weighty enough that we should hardly be prevented from denouncing them with the claim that the underpinnings of traditional morality are being undermined by capital. an entire spectrum of nebulous conduct whi will be hard to label “revolutionary. proﬁteers. if a community of struggle is formed between the looters and producers. it signiﬁes that a communist movement’s weapons are above all the transformation of social relationships and the production of social conditions of existence.” We do not even oppose lifelong heterosexual monogamy. In any case. a cry whi contains the kernel of the inﬁnite variety of possible sexual and sensual practices whi have been repressed for millennia. it subverts. the less it needs to be repressive. who but priests would think of holding it against them?) As for hoarders. hard but necessary work. hoarders. Until then. Capital was based on bourgeois and petit bourgeois values: property as the fruit of work and saving. if violent measures will be necessary at times it will be to reappropriate things. in the ﬁrst place. e traditional moral order is oppressive and merits being criticized and combaed as su. is not the supreme value for communism. a simple juxtaposition of private appropriations. Next. e bourgeois morality conceived in its full scope during the 19th century and transmied through religious annels and secular sools arose from a need for ideological conduits towards the domination of industrial capitalism at a time when capital was not yet entirely dominant. Not every revolt against this order necessarily tends toward neo-reformism. as well as temporary inequalities. If money is nothing more than pieces of paper. perhaps longer. We are all the more willing to aﬃrm this since human life. and above all.” etc. But if it ﬁnds itself in a state of crisis it is not because our contemporaries prize freedom more than our ancestors. but in one or two generations. e object of this myth is to provide a spiritual bonus for couples — those isolated atoms whi constitute the capitalist economy’s best basis. if what is hoarded can no longer be exanged for money. are far from inactive in France itself.
¹Author’s note: romantic stories. measures must be taken — not in the sense of a “return to law and order. Ongoing communization will resolve this. priests from Rome or Moscow. that a communist movement uses only the amount of violence whi is strictly necessary to rea its goals.

since capital’s omnipresence theoretically makes previous relay systems superﬂuous. whi is itself thrown into disarray by the constraints of money and work. In the unfortunate mind clouded by this mysterious training. e damage su a society undergoes will always be less than the damage it exposes itself to by turning asocial people into monsters. Capitalism. always remains.” La Revolution Surrealiste. who are prepared to risk suﬀering and even death for the simple pleasure of rupturing social bonds. at there will be people who refuse to play the game. It is also at stake during periods of social unrest. Until now. I can imagine a still-gleaming paradise whi begins with a resounding crash of broken dishes. (…) Unimpeded fun has all the products of the world at its disposal. it transforms people and relationships whi come into being outside it (peasants who come to the city. a falling ba upon traditional values like the family whi on the whole are outmoded. With the disappearance of community places to get together (cafés …) and their replacement by places to consume whi la feeling (discos. rough credit people gain access to property before saving. malls). then. does not create something from nothing. e promises of the dreamworld of commercials are not kept. working for a salary becomes the only possible activity. Whi results in the phenomenon of people continuing to marry although three out of four marriages end in a divorce. ey work because it is practical. Because it is obliged to order about. Because there is nothing else. and never will be. Fortunately this doesn’t work. to ildren who are astounded by the news. no “non-state” whi would still remain a state. More profoundly. Les Pieds Mieies) What to do with the dish smashers? Today it is impossible to answer this question and it is not certain that there will be a satisfactory one even in a stateless society. during the ﬁrst years of the Russian revolution a “Bolshevik marriage code” whose title is an entire program in itself was juxtaposed onto a
family life. It becomes diﬃcult to make “customs” permanent. beneath the crisis of bourgeois morality lies a crisis of what is known as capitalist morality. Everything announced in the Communist Manifesto has been accomplished by capitalism. us. making itself indispensable and inevitable. however “innocent” they might be. Since everything becomes a commodity. 3. capital has to permanently re-introduce relay values of authority and
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. too mu is asked of the family at a time when it has less than ever to oﬀer. Sools and the media allenge parents with respect to authority.” (Georges Bataille. What morality. wage labor is able to present itself as a non-constraint and guarantee of freedom. uniquely capitalist society. no. however asocial they might be. capital’s functioning itself is not harmonious. ea aspect of morality becomes outmoded. su is the no doubt unavoidable risk any society will run if it refuses to expel anyone at all. teaers and mothers aﬃrm. Communism must not lose its raison d’etre in order to save a few lives. wholly. immigrants). who smash the dishes. “To repress anti-social reactions would be as unimaginable as it would be unacceptable on principle. inﬂuence and education. In the ﬁrst half of the 20th century capital reaed a point where it occupied the entire social space. Consider the fate reserved for looters and thieves during 19th century riots and the moral order whi was reproduced in these riots. at least in the form of nostalgia. not out of a sense of duty. ea object is to be tossed in the air and smashed like a plaything. to ﬁnd ways of relating and behaviour whi go beyond the bankruptcy of bourgeois morality. In a communist world there will be no substitute state. not without the most hilarious gravity. even as it imposes itself on everyone. for one thing.” (“Leer to the Insane Asylum Head Doctors. ere is no purely. push around and constrain wage workers. In the same sense. however. And something from the old sociability. does modern capitalism oﬀer? e submission of everyone and everything. As well. the mediations conceived to avoid or soen conﬂicts or to maintain internal order in societies have caused oppression and human losses whi are inﬁnitely greater than those they were supposed to prevent or limit. e extended family gives way to the nuclear family.order only a burst of laughter away from becoming unglued? (…) Life is not a laughing maer. 15 April 1925) It is not only with respect to the distant future that this question is pertinent. causing a reaction. petit-bourgeois déclassés.

especially before confession. Everyone can rid themselves of the individual as if he or she were a harmful beast. But the passage whi follows in the text is of more interest: “Any individual who is condemned by the laws of any society. Or they become invisible. to make them a so dough whi can be moulded by one’s fantasies. But don’t count on us either if you want to replace prisons with an even more extreme distancing. An obsession with interpretation replaces confessional rites and the examination of conscience. Sadeian desire aims to reify other people completely. Since the person is thrown ba into a situation where the usual eye-for-an-eye laws are in place. by deﬁnition. is is a deadly aitude: to annihilate otherness. Expelled from the community. with their logic of individual self-improvement.² Ahead of his time. of a proliferation of codes. to refuse to be dependent on the desire of someone else. “It is curious to state that one only has to lighten up (and in this sense someone not prematurely old cannot help but rival the most unruly ild) in order to ﬁnd the sleaziest thieves arming. etc. Or they are obliged to leave and go into the jungle. and death. have become their own fantasy dough-to-be-kneaded. will have the right to eject the person from its midst and to declare that society’s protection is not guaranteed to the individual.” (Bakunin. they “aieve their fantasies. this opens the door to a tranquilizer-ridden totalitarianism or to the discourse of psyiatrists. Today people do not lose themselves in other people.” Or rather they aempt to. replace the neuroses and hysteria of the previous era. any time spent in one is too long.obedience even though its present stage has made them obsolete. they activate and develop their capacity for pleasure. Insipid trainers of their own bodies. not their disappearance. in any case. is is why the old ideology is constantly used in conjunction with the new one (participation. La Liberté. Narcissism and sizophrenia. etc. they are laughed at every time they open their mouths. Our era is one of a coexistence of moralities. like they jog instead of running for the sake of it or because they have to get somewhere quily. until people become themselves. means repeating the same thing. But in this case the society. As for treating crime like a siness. Pauvert) is makes one think of the solution of primitive peoples: individuals who violate taboos are no longer taken seriously. Is the social
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. de Sade simply announced our own. their ability to have orgasms. We will always be on the side of those who are unwilling to submit. that death will shortly occur is assured. in turn. one in whi. etc. province or nation will retain the right to refuse to accept the sentence whi has been imposed by declaring that he or she no longer wishes to be a member of the society in question. What guides people’s behaviour today is less and less an unquestionable ensemble of dictates whi is transmied by a father or a priest than a sort of utilitarian morality of personal improvement that utilizes a fetishization of the body and a frenzied psyologization of human relations. where the traits of a communicationless pleasure are inﬁnitely repeated. Because what is a sentence that is “too long”? It is hardly necessary to have wasted away in prison to know that. never must the person be forced into servitude or enslaved. commune. “Beer than
²Author’s note: Examen de conscience: A Catholic religious rite imposed on believers from time to time.). However. someone who refuses to submit can thus be pillaged. e intolerable boredom the reader of the Marquis’ monotonous catalogue sooner or later experiences is recaptured when you read the want ads. the maladies aracteristic of our period. count us out. mistreated or even killed without the society becoming perturbed. there is no moral guarantee. But whereas the Sadeian hero smashes social impediments. ey are not overcome by desires. If it is a question of destroying prisons in order to rebuild ones whi are a bit less harsh and beer ventilated. they tell them: “Come!”.
ishment and death sentences whi have been blessed and carried out by the law. e abolition of all indeﬁnite sentences or ones whi are too long and leave no possibility for rehabilitation: crime must be considered a siness. modern people.” You would think you were reading the Socialist Party program before they took power. Guilt (being afraid of violating a taboo) is juxtaposed with anguish (a sense of a la of guideposts with respect to “oices” to be made). at least in the territory occupied by the society.

No human and social games without stakes and risks! is is the unique and seemingly unavoidable norm. but by an ethic of survival and by sexual promiscuity. 1981). the ﬁlm La Grande Bouﬀe). It then becomes apparent that relentless sensuality (e.eryone pleases everyone else is evoked. or products of the misery of human social customs. (Le Monde. is the world promised by the liberalization of customs. Bataille starts with sexuality and ends up with religion. But one would have to believe in miracles to imagine that if Friedri desired Jenny. Sexual constraints are replaced by a diﬃculty in aﬃrming a sexual identity. religion becomes a means of making it easier to handle life-crisis periods (adolescence. From the ﬁction piece L’Oeil until the end of his life. Bakunin’s response is not really convincing: “e complete abolition of all degrading and cruel sentences. representations swept away. Communism in no way guarantees that all desires will be complementary.
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. one where making love is like shaking hands and does not imply any kind of involvement. On the way his trajectory crossed that of the revolutionary movement. as in the previous century. etc. one’s partners and oneself. Bataille seared for what was implicit in L’Oeil. Unless. the need for work is replaced by the need to make leisure time a success. what makes Fourier’s system less tedious than those of most other Utopians is that his system integrates the necessity of conﬂicts. April 12. Aside from its very poetic and extensive list of possibilities. marriage. “Run!”.g. So it would appear that Karl will continue to please Jenny more than Friedri. ey are all the more lost.” And it is precisely when this question is posed most directly that the ances of noticing that it is not a “question” are best. And the very real tragedy of unshared desire would appear to be the unavoidable price to pay to keep the game of seduction exciting. however. Perhaps … But if the desire for vengeance gets the upper hand? And if the other person continues to kill? In the workers’ movement the anarists are undoubtedly among the few people who have concretely considered the problem of social life without the state. only to resurface as a commodity. is. not only religion is helping to keep people up-to-date: the family is invoked as well! “Not a family whi is omnipresent. “Dance!”. people are more poorly equipped than ever to resolve the “question of sexuality. In the midst of the crisis of morality that dominates Western society. when this commodiﬁcation concerns a sexuality whi has been repressed for 2000 years. For example. our monkey-like imagination makes us unable to understand human beings.” according to psyologist Christopher Las. she would automatically desire him. by remaining in ho to the old world. accidents due to competition (the murder of a bank teller). We know that virtually all the accidents the old world considers crimes or oﬀenses are just sudden anges of owners (the). Nevertheless. Not because of the principle “anything obtained without eﬀort is useless. In su a world the only guarantee that people would not torture other people would be that they feel no need to. only to veer away all the more quily and easily when the movement almost completely disappeared. during the last years before World War Two. is is why his work remains ambiguous. death). For people today. the work of someone like Georges Bataille reveals a lot about Western evolution since the beginning of the century. People today are paniing. But if someone needs to? If the person enjoys torturing? With the old eye-for-an-eye and blood price etc. Since they end up with the impression that the idea of sexuality is deadly and alienating. Also. in a world of commodities. isolates individuals even more from humanity. A family no longer deﬁned by the work ethic or by sexual constraints. Instead of invoking a transcendence. but one that is omni-absent. a woman whose lover was just assassinated or a man whose lover had just been tortured would ﬁnd it completely idiotic (in spite of their sorrow) to kill someone or to lo them up in order to compensate for the loss suﬀered in su a weird way. is narcissistic culture goes hand in hand with a ange in the function of religion. he defended positions with respect to anti-fascism and the threat of war whi lucidly cut through the verbiage of the vast majority of the extreme le. people ultimately readopt a Christian outlook.” but because desire includes otherness and thus its possible negation. of corporal pun-
that!”. Going against the grain of the history of civilization. as everything alive turns into a commodity. But in a stateless world it is not unimaginable that exacerbated passions could make someone kill someone else or make them suﬀer.

to reﬁning a new version of Satanism. in feelings of communion with nature. One could even conceive of a humanity whi. it ﬂushes out the old taboos from the places where they have taken refuge. people’s prisons. Any community. Religions.). and with it all life on the planet. ere can be no humanity without risk in any case. but for later. What is intolerable is that humanity is doing so entirely unconsciously. have circumscribed the sacred. for the simple reason that these desires are not necessarily shared by others. though. and its various residues and ersatz manifestations continue to encumber social life. it has kept a lid on it. decides to disappear and to reintegrate into nature in the form of dust. kinship systems. he has also wrien sentences whi reveal a profound intuition about essential aspects of communism: “taking perversion and crime not as values whi exclude. is desire to become one with the species whi has been annelled towards the cosmos or a divinity has until now worn the prestigious rags of the sacred. that is. in the ﬁrst place. is not what upsets us. And because it has created capital. and at the same time it begins to go beyond the sacredness whi capitalism has only degraded. assigning it a leading role while at the same time distancing it from human life. bourgeois contracts. because there can be no humanity without other people — whi is also just as evident in the game of passions. whatever its size. emotional and sexual life has constantly been the stakes. the desire to go beyond the limits of the individual expresses itself through states of paroxysm. a matrix of passions. having initially fought and then tamed and loved the universe. when people are perfect. Until then. he limits himself to going against the grain of accepted values.. where the sacred is inseparable from daily life. And. In a world in whi obsolete religious ideas and commodity banalization coexist. allows accepting everything in the meantime. in ecstasy. to practice relations of seduction whi are at the same time simpler and more reﬁned. obliges its members to renounce a part of themselves. In contrast to primitive societies. Next there is the soothing vision of a desirable society whi would disgust us if it were aieved. and that this risk will probably remain despite the forms of social organization in place. that as soon as people began to alter their environment they risked destroying it and themselves with it. In the event of a social revolution. not anging society from top to boom will be accepted: a society without a state or prisons — ﬁne.
Calling communism a paradise. In trances. Capitalist civilization has not eliminated the sacred. and monotheistic ones in particular. But to feel fully alive. courtly love. in the above. etc. everything becomes justiﬁable: a workers’ state. It is true. a zone of contact with another cultural sphere: the sacred. What makes su a situation tolerable is the certainty that there remains the possibility of withdrawing if someone ﬁnds that giving these things up threatens their personal integrity. but as things to be integrated into the totality of humanity. in spite of itself. a communist critique is double-pronged: it gets rid of the sacred.” But if. whi imposes its own inhumane laws. since communism is only ﬁt for a humankind of gods. in statist societies it has become more and more specialized. etc. we are also unable to stiﬂe a yawn when a world in whi ev-
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. is not the risk of suﬀering and death indispensable? e fact that humanity threatens to wipe itself out by playing with the laws of maer. the only one that leaves me unquened. is would not take place without suﬀering. If we can easily imagine that a less harsh society would give women and men (men who have been condemned to wear only work clothes since the bourgeois revolution!) a ance to be more beautiful.”
Ecstasy
rough the cultural constructions to whi it has given birth (love as it was practised by the ancient Greeks. in the sense of positive desires — ones whose bringing to fruition would not compromise other people — to leave certain positive desires unfulﬁlled.It can be used to illustrate the religious impasses where the experience of the limits of unleashed sexuality ends up: “A brothel is my true ur. as in most of his work.

or priests.
e sacred aspects of the zones where the old obsessions su as the pubis have taken refuge must therefore be removed. and.
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.millenarian prophecies. the obscure fold where their being is located! Rape thus becomes the crime of crimes. a world whi proposes that we love the species and individuals whose insuﬃciencies will be ones of the species and no longer those of existence. As if violently inﬂicting a penis’ penetration were more disgusting than forcing a woman into wage slavery through economic pressure! But it is true that in the ﬁrst instance it is easy to locate the guilty party — an individual — whereas in the second it is a question of a social relationship.” (E. this gives us an opportunity to free ourselves from sexuality as a specialized sphere. what makes a Somalian rip out his wife’s clitoris and what animates the feminists ﬂows from the same concept of human individuality as the object of property relations. the feminist ideology has come up with nothing beer than fetishizing women’s genitalia. Today’s world asks us to love just a jumble of individual inadequacies. baed by piles of pathos and literature. illusory and limited nature history has made plain. e stakes today — what is worth risking one’s life for and what could impart another rhythm to time — is the content of life in its entirety. this part would have to be entirely diﬀerent. the fact remains that commodity banalization of every aspect of life tends to empty existence’s passionate content. its conquering imperialism. doctors. innumerable physical aggressions at work.³ But when she desires.M. Cioran. If contemporary mystical quests play a counterrevolutionary role because they are just a way for bourgeois individuals to withdraw into themselves. a ﬁnal party that can only be earned through our sweat and disasters? For future idiots prancing on our ashes? In its absurdity a vision of a paradisiacal culmination surpasses hope’s worst wanderings. In the clitoris of his wife it is the human desire of both sexes whi is symbolically targeted. or having the apparatus of social control start a ﬁle on you did not constitute forms of intimate violence whi are just as profound as an imposed intercourse! Ultimately. the Somalian believes that it is his duty to protect her from feminine desire. e world we desire is one in whi the possibility of going beyond oneself exists in every human activity. It is easier to exorcise fear by making rape a blasphemy. e only pretext to apologize for Time is that some moments are found to be more proﬁtable than others — accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities. Since capitalism has banalized everything. Precis de decomposition) Communism is not a paradise-like culmination. she becomes part of a community in
³Author’s note: this sentence and the following two paragraphs have been understandably aaed by many readers since they were based on our biased understanding of a famous slogan of the free abortion movements of the 70s: “My body belongs to me. making it the headquarters of what makes them diﬀerent. an ontological aa. Compared to traditional societies it has lost an essential dimension of human life: the high points when people are united with nature. Translator’s note: Several people who read or proofread this part (and the preceding paragraph) had trouble with it too. But we are not interested in a ridiculous longing for the past. To counter adoration of the penis.
Crime
“e meaninglessness of history is delightful.” is slogan did not mean what we said it did (“I am the property-owner of my body”) but was just an ea»y way to say “My body (the right. e feminist who shouts that her body belongs to her wants to keep her desire for herself. e mutilated woman has been amputated from humanity. he profoundly reduces and impoverishes his own pleasure and his own desire. a return to the joys whose repetitive. an invasion in the holy of holies — as if being manipulated by ads. Convinced that his wife is one of his belongings.” If re-wrien today. searing for “communal unity” and “convulsive communication” elsewhere than in revolution becomes purely reactionary. We are condemned to wat harvest festivals on TV. whi is seen as parasitically dangerous to the economy of the group.to give birth or to have an abortion) is my business and not that of politicians. At a time when capitalism tends to impose its reign without sharing. Why torment ourselves about destiny’s happy ending. But in so doing.

History includes high points whi go beyond and are part of the present. because until now it is the sacred whi has represented the only high point where people’s irrepressible need to be together has manifested itself. and in the species. as ﬂesh and feelings. though. white.whi appropriation dissolves. but the history of individuals or of the species is also not a purely linear unfolding whi capitalism produces (and convinces people that it produces). adult. and in
⁴Author’s note: Union sacrée: term used at the beginning of the First World War when the parties in France worked together against the German threat.” in short. Sexologists will be around to cure any libidinal letdowns. But nothing is for certain. Bataille. the Corsican. Has it not been oen enough repeated that these rights only concern an abstract person and have only ultimately beneﬁed the bourgeois individual! Bourgeois. etc. the person from Vietnam. it is said nowadays. Our bodies. By becoming an owner in turn. Neo-reformism claims to correct this by giving real content to this hitherto abstract “man. women will be protected: to ea her own! is pitiful demand reﬂects the obsession with “security” whi the media and all the political parties are doing their utmost to make contemporary people adopt. “Christianity has substantialized the sacred. To escape the secular oppression of women who were previously treated as objects to be possessed by their husbands (and who still are today in other ways). it can be presumed that in modern war only a minority would participate. our body belongs to it. Le Sacre. We witnessed a broader “union sacree” (worldwide this time) at the beginning of the Gulf War. to prevent any excesses. and the police. e only important thing about these practices is what. in the panic whi grips a crowd. orgasms where people lose themselves in-other people. and.
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. in the great patribtic outbursts and other manifestations of the “union sacree” (”sacred union”)⁴ — whose manipulation allows every dirty tri. with the help of emistry. in voodoo during slave revolts.” What is being criticized here are eﬀects whi are said to be their cause! e demand to control one’s body is a restatement of the bourgeois demand for property rights.” (G. At the same time that it strips away what is sacred. “My body belongs to me” follows directly in the footsteps of the bourgeois revolution whi these feminists are aempting to complete and perfect for ever and ever by requesting democracy to cease being “formal. industrial time frame opped into pieces like a sausage. Works). in society. the gay. since everything has been levelled. the Jew.” e real “rights” of the real “man. e demand “My body belongs to me” supposedly gives concrete content to the “Rights of Man” of 1789. And to the extent that we are able to love the human species. e manipulation of the sacred still has sunny days ahead.” but because. We cannot escape from history. But the nature of the sacred (…) is perhaps the hardest thing to pin down whi takes place between people. e sacred is simply a privileged moment of communal union. in its most degraded form. is demand arises in relation to a horizon whi is bloed oﬀ: to master something (in this case one’s body). Today this instant of “communal unity” is to be found at concerts. But the “real man” is simply the woman. an instant of convulsive communication whi is usually snuﬀed out. feminism has come up with nothing beer than expanding property rights. is has been demonstrated for example in Taoist trances in resistance to the central powers in ancient China. In su a world there would no longer be a ﬁeld of human activity whi would create a diﬀerent temporal rhythm by making questioning everything the stakes. they don’t really possess: what can be communicated. psyotherapists
to avoid mental suﬀering. belong to those who love us — not because of a legally guaranteed “right. by deﬁnition. male. perhaps. As opposed to what is taking place in baward capitalist countries like Iran. the rest would wat. we live and evolve only through them. private appropriation is the only means whi can be envisioned. e a historical illusion whi is the basis of mystical practices is a dangerous one. mystical practices have also cemented revolts. a world where. making love and working would take place in the same quantiﬁed. everything is equal and everything can be exanged — playing sports. a communist critique denounces the capitalist Utopia of a world in whi people are no longer able to love to death. If they have provided a more or less imaginary nook sheltered from class struggle.